Word: sexualism
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...swings, matters coming full circle and a psychic return to prerevolutionary days. "We are in a '50s period again," says Miami Psychiatrist Gail Wainger. "People are looking for more lasting relationships, and they want babies." In the '70s Wainger's case load was predictably heavy with patients complaining about sexual inadequacies. "Not having an orgasm was an O.K. reason to come in for therapy. Now they come in because they are not happy with their lives, their jobs, their inability to find relationships...
Fear of herpes obviously prods the trend along but explains the new caution only in part. In 1980, when herpes was just beginning to impinge on the nation's consciousness, a Cosmopolitan survey found that "so many readers wrote negatively about the sexual revolution, expressing longings for vanished intimacy and the now elusive joys of romance and commitment, that we began to sense that there might be a sexual counterrevolution under way in America." Cosmopolitan Editor Helen Gurley Brown, never one to miss a sexual trend, says, "Sex with commitment is absolutely delicious. Sex with your date for the evening...
...problem in gauging the nation's sexual temper is that those in charge of the effort seem to know very little about what is really going on. On the subject of the sexual revolution, the specialists divide into three categories: the experts who think the revolution has ended, those who insist that it is still continuing, and a small group who say it never existed at all. In the last faction is John Gagnon, a sociologist who says the idea of a sexually permissive society was basically a construct of American journalism...
...sexual revolution was born in the mid-'60s, the product of affluence, demographics and the Pill. Women had been pouring into the work force since World War II, and the Pill offered sexual liberation to go with growing social and economic freedom. The baby-boom generation shaped its culture around sex, drugs and defiance of traditional values. The California therapies, chiefly those derived from the ideas of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, supplied much of the rationale for the sexual revolt. Fulfillment and growth came from close attention to the needs of the self. Maslow taught that the self...
...sexual arena, self-fulfillment converted almost every sexual itch into a sexual need. Acts that had traditionally been viewed as perversions, like sadomasochism, were now proclaimed "alternative life-styles," presumably self-fulfilling for those attracted to them. Joseph Epstein, in his book Divorced in America, argued that for those on a lifelong mission of self-fulfillment, the very thing that led individuals into marriage?more growth?was bound to lead them right on out; the ties and obligations of wedded life blocked the proper unfolding of the self. But, points out Carlfred Broderick of the University of Southern California...